- Purpose: Make subject line clear. Avoid email conversations. If worth discussing something, discuss in person or by phone. Let people know clearly whether a response is required or not. Be sure to include only the important information.
- Timing: If you need an answer quicker than 24 hours, phone or find the person. It is unreasonable to expect immediate responses. The flip side of that is that we should endeavour to respond within a reasonable time frame of 24 hours to parent emails.
- Focus: Email only the people who need to read it. Keep brief (preferred in emails). If can’t be brief, needs to be a meeting. When forwarding an email, please summarize what you need the new recipient to know rather than having to read the whole prior email chain to determine their action/response.
- Recipients: Use the To: field for the person who needs to take action. Optimally, this is one person in the To: line. Use carbon copy (CC) and blind carbon copy (BCC) sparingly.
- CC is for advising others who are involved in the conversation and need to contribute. Anyone who is CCed will be included in reply all.
- BCC is for advising others, but they are not being asked to contribute. Anyone who is BCCed will not be included in reply all.
- Efficiency: We recommend archiving all emails as soon as you have handled them (replied, added to a separate task list, and labelled the messages). The “Getting Things Done” technique encourages you to deal with incoming messages the first time you read them. You either deal with them right then if take less than say 2-3 minutes, or you file them in another folder to be dealt with when you have time (e.g. put in a To Reply or To Read folder). Here is a great blog post which explains how to use Getting Things Done in GMail to increase your productivity. Here are two videos and a blog post about email organization systems by three NIST staff.
- Teresa Tung’s guide to Inbox: 0
- Jay Priebe’s video of using Getting Things Done by setting up Multiple Inboxes
- Mitch Norris’ video about using Flags and Inbox setup to handle email
Addresses and Groups
When you start to type the person’s first name in the address box of a new email, it will auto-fill. There are email groups already made in the system for you. If you want to make your own address groups, you need to use Distribution List.
Filing/Searching Emails
You can sort emails by using labels in Gmail to find them later, or you can use the search tool.
Attaching Files
An easy way to share files with coworkers is to attach them to the message. Gmail makes it easy to attach files directly from Google Drive.